


To Solemnly Swear That Any Mischief Will Be Managed

by secondstartotheright_straighton



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-02-26
Packaged: 2018-01-13 22:02:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1242184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secondstartotheright_straighton/pseuds/secondstartotheright_straighton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hogwarts isn't all that different during the Marauders Era - there's still the adventure, the drama, and even a little bit of romance. But mostly, there's the magic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Solemnly Swear That Any Mischief Will Be Managed

**Author's Note:**

> A/N This is my first Marauders piece, and I started it on a whim, so please let me know if I made any mistakes in my haste! This first chapter is kind of an introductory piece, to get to know the characters before they really know each other. Please review, and I hope you like it! 
> 
> There will be some romance (much later, they're only eleven), but I'm going to be mostly focusing on the friendships and the adventures. 
> 
> Disclaimer: I reeeeaaaallllyyy wish I owned Harry Potter, but I don't. Credit to J.K. Rowling.

Coming from a Pureblood family, James Potter was no stranger to magic. He was, however, still stunned when he saw Hogwarts for the first time. It was like something from a fairytale, but not the watered down versions for kids – dark and gothic.

On the train, he had been quick to avoid a compartment containing a sallow looking first-year with greasy hair and a small boy with great, ugly scars across his face. He wouldn’t mix with them. It would completely downgrade his social status. What he didn’t notice was that a pretty little red-headed girl joined the two boys in the compartment just a few minutes after he had passed, smiling brightly at the sallow boy, and quickly holding her hand out to the one whose face was marred by scars.

As James moved further along the train, he found a compartment containing a group of first year boys, all of whom looked very confident. With no hesitation, James opened the door and strode in, smirking. Most of them nodded in what they reckoned was a polite, yet cool, way of greeting him. His confidence meant that he fitted in – and implied his blood status – wizard through and through. That was important.

The boy closest to James, whose name was Sirius, introduced all of the boys in the compartment, by their last name, of course. There was Rosier, Pettigrew (though he didn’t seem to fit in as well as the others, as he was mousey looking and not confident in the slightest), Nott and Black, the last of which was Sirius’s last name. All were very respectable Pureblood families. As soon as they heard that he was a Potter, they boys welcomed him immediately, and they quickly became engrossed in a conversation about Quidditch.

* * *

Several compartments away, Lily Evans introduced herself to a small, worried looking boy that had scars on his face. She couldn’t help but feel bad for the boy – they must have been horribly painful. His name was Remus Lupin. Though she had known Severus Snape, the pale boy next to her, for quite some time before boarding the Hogwarts Express, she still thought that Wizarding names were very weird. Not that it really mattered. She still wasn’t even entirely over the fact that magic actually existed. Of course, when she had been very little she had believed in magic – fairies, wicked witched trapping beautiful princesses in towers, flying broomsticks and miracles – but as she’d grown older she began to believe that it was all just stories. She didn’t think for a moment that those stories might have actually been based off something real. Only now she was attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Unless she was dreaming, it had to be real.

She had always excelled at Muggle school, as Severus called it. Not once had she failed to understand something that the teachers had set her, and she was always ahead of most of the class. Now, though, she worried about school. She’d never studied magic before. There would be lots of people who knew more than her. What if the few things she had discovered she could do were merely tricks and she wasn’t actually magic? What if she failed? What if she got thrown out?

All of a sudden, she missed her sister, Petunia. Since Lily had befriended Severus and received her Hogwarts letter, Petunia had become distant. She was always angry at Lily. Some part of Lily knew that (as she had read in a book once) anger is a secondary emotion, and therefore Petunia was upset. Upset because Lily was leaving for boarding school. Upset because she hadn’t been getting as much attention from her parents as her sister was. Upset because she wasn’t magic. But another part of Lily knew that, though Petunia was jealous of her magic, she also thought there was something deeply wrong with it. She thought of it as unnatural. And Lily decided that she couldn’t deal with that. The girls had stopped talking. Severus was Lily’s only real friend now.

* * *

 

Remus had been convinced that he was going to be ostracized at Hogwarts because of his scars and... other things. And for the first ten minutes on the Hogwarts Express, he had been. He had seen too many people glance into the compartment just to turn away before he could make eye contact. After the first few, he buried his head in the book and pretended not to notice. The book also meant that nobody could see his tears.

As soon as Lily Evans had walked in, he brightened up considerably. He saw her take in his scars, and watched as her brow furrowed, but it didn’t look like she was judging him - especially when she gave him a small smile. She was sympathetic. Then she grinned broadly and introduced herself before introducing him to the boy sitting on the other side of the compartment, Severus, who nodded at him. He looked almost as bad as Remus felt, so he didn’t take it to be rude.

As soon as Lily spied the book that he’d been hiding in (Hogwarts: A History), she launched into a very animated talk about how excited she was, and all the secrets of the school, and the lessons. Remus didn’t mind that she talked so much. She had accepted him. And listening to her voice was actually quite pleasant after what had been an uncomfortably silent ten minutes alone in the compartment with Severus.

Soon after, Remus began talking back, and about halfway through the journey, Severus finally snapped out of his mood.

* * *

 

Though outwardly Sirius came across as very confident and maybe a little cocky, inside he was as nervous as a rabbit in the headlights of an adapted broomstick. He had gravitated towards the children of people he knew his parents invited to their awful dinner parties while on the platform, and they all decided that they would share a compartment. He did it more for his parents than himself because, in all honestly, he didn’t particularly like the boys. They were unnecessarily rude and stupid. But they were Pureblood, and to his family that was all that mattered.

Rosier and Nott were positively evil. In the time they had been forced to spend together he had seen them shoot hexes at unsuspecting Muggles, beat up younger siblings for saying that they didn’t understand why they couldn’t be friends with half-bloods or Mudbloods, and even force house elves to hurt themselves. Sirius himself never felt the need to hurt other people unless they angered him, however he had learnt at a young age never to ask his parents about the bloodline thing. Not unless he wanted to be punished.

Pettigrew was a different story. Not once had he ever tried to hurt somebody, but Sirius knew that his parents were in the same league as the Rosiers, the Notts and the Noble House of Black. So it confused him that half the time he just stood there looking like he’d fall over if someone came near him.

All of a sudden, Sirius was worried about his sorting. The more he thought about it, the more he knew that he didn’t fit in with Rosier and Nott. Or with his parents for that matter. Which meant he might not be in Slytherin. The very idea made him want to leap off the train – not once had a Black been sorted into any house other than Slytherin. He couldn’t be the one to break tradition. No. It wasn’t going to happen.

His reverie was broken when a boy with untidy dark hair and glasses strode into the compartment, straight backed and with a grin on his face, and he was actually relieved. With the way he acted, the boy was quite obviously a Pureblood, though Sirius had never met him before at one of the painful dinner parties. That meant that there was the possibility that he wasn’t like the rest of them – that he wasn’t someone who Sirius would want to kill. Maybe they could even be friends. At that thought, he introduced the boy to himself and the others in the compartment. The boy was James Potter, and soon they were in an exciting conversation about Quidditch. Hogwarts might not be so bad after all.


End file.
